Why Agent Engagement Hinges on Tool Effectiveness

If organisations want to deliver a great customer experience, it’s important to create a great agent experience.

Research consistently indicates a significant connection between an agent’s level of engagement and satisfaction and their ability to provide a positive customer experience. A study by Ventana Research found that a very satisfied agent is twice as likely as one less satisfied to meet key performance metrics such as average handling time, customer satisfaction scores, and first-contact resolution rates. Furthermore, the same research shows that when agents must access multiple systems, interaction handling times increase, as do data-entry errors, and first-contact resolution rates fall. All issues which affect agent satisfaction.

Additional research by the International Customer Management Institute revealed that the number one contributor to an agent’s level of engagement in the performance of their job is whether or not the tools and resources provided by the contact centre enable them to be successful in serving their customers. In other words, effective systems aren’t just here to benefit the customer experience – they’re also the most powerful way of empowering agents to be highly engaged with their work. The bad news? 92% of organisations stated that their agent-facing tools could be more effective in delivering a positive customer experience! If contact centres want to solve their agent engagement problem, they need to solve their system shortcomings. An investment in a modern agent desktop could contribute to greater retention and improved morale, which would be welcomed news for the many contact centres who battle annual turnover rates between 30 – 45%.

A unified agent desktop would help organisations to solve many of these common challenges for a multitude of reasons, including:

– The design is cohesive, more intuitive, and ensures a modern look and feel

– Contact centre Agents are equipped with a comprehensive view of the customer, including demographic data, transaction, and interaction history

– Information that’s linked to the customer record can be pushed to the agent, leading to the potential for increased speed of issue resolution

– Contact centre Agents receive recommendation and insight on the next best action for resolution or to proactively anticipate future customer needs.

When these systems are deployed, contact centres are also likely to benefit by leveraging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyse their data in more robust and comprehensive ways. This provides the system (and agents) with recommendations that are highly personalised and hyper-relevant to the customer, which leads to a higher probability of customers receiving the best outcome for the unique situation.

As a result of creating better customer outcomes, and eradicating the inefficiencies and annoyances of cumbersome, disconnected systems, organisations will discover an elevated level of performance from their agents and benefit from increased customer satisfaction, too.